As far as students are concerned, we tend to assume that a professor’s purpose starts with teaching students and ends at the classroom door. But outside of Northwestern’s campus, professors are cointinuing their education, working on research in their disciplines, writing articles, composing music, creating artwork and more. The DeWitt Library is bringing this fact to the attention of the student body with the Northwestern Review, a new academic journal.
“Professors teach, and we are a teaching institution and that is important, but they have these outside interests as well that they are working on and that we don’t always see,” Greta Grond, library director, said. “Some of the things are pretty fascinating.”
Most published journals have a thematic focus based on one topic. This journal’s main theme is scholarship, encompassing a wide variety of topics including history, psychology, political science, philosophy, arts, music and science.
Access Services Coordinator Sara Huyser got a sneak peek of the journal before it launched and really enjoyed one professor’s research.
“I particularly enjoyed reading Mike Kugler’s essay with his cartoons and World War II with his dad,” Huyser said.
Not only does the journal contain work from faculty on campus, but there are also pieces in this first issue that are collaborations between students and professors. One biology and two psychology posters by students are featured in this journal.
In the future, Grond looks forward to the possibility of publishing more journals and the opportunity that would provide students to publish their own work from different research projects.
“The platform we use allows us to publish as many journals as we would like, so if students have interest in publishing a journal, we can use this platform to do that,” Grond said. “This would mean that students could formally publish their honors research and any other academic topic they have investigated. The student would have to meet with us and we would see how they wanted to do it-whether they want us to manage it or if the students themselves want to be the editors.”
The idea to create the Northwestern Review has been around for approximately 4 years but started to really take shape in the fall of 2015. Organizing the journal was a group effort led by Grond and Doug Anderson, reference librarian and archivist. The journal is considered public domain and will be accessible to the entire world. Anyone will be able to download works from the journal, whether or not they are students or staff/faculty at the college.
Part of the description for the Northwestern Review states the following:
“The Northwestern Review is an academic online commons for the varied research of the college’s faculty, completed or in progress, individually or in teams, within the same discipline or spanning multiple disciplines.”
The Northwestern Review launched on Thursday, Jan. 28 and can be accessed through a link on the DeWitt Library’s home page. The journal is be discoverable on search engines such as WorldCat and Google. The URL is nwcommons.nwciowa.edu/northwesternreview.
